Police said most of the “thousands” demonstrating, who included large trade union delegations and members of Germany’s Left Party, were peaceful but a “violent minority” lobbed “stones and unidentified liquids” at officers, almost 90 of whom were injured.

Surrounded by barricades, police had to use water cannon to clear a path to the entrance.

Black smoke from heaps of burning tyres and rubbish bins billowed out over the city as ECB president Mario Draghi gave a speech saying that the new HQ was “a symbol of what Europe can achieve.”

Green Party economy minister for Hesse state Tarek al-Wazir admitted that the demonstrators were asking “some of the right questions” and that “austerity can be self-defeating” — but claimed the ECB was the wrong target as it wasn’t responsible for government cuts.

But Mr Draghi’s speech gave the lie to Mr Wazir’s words as he insisted that “the fact that some had to go through a difficult period of adjustment was not a choice that was imposed on them. It was a consequence of their past decisions.”

The German media and politicians have responded to the Blockupy protests against the ECB on Wednesday by denouncing the protesters and demanding restrictions on the freedom of assembly. They seized on clashes prior to the demonstration, involving a few small autonomous and anarchist groups, as a pretext. The protest organisers explicitly distanced themselves from these fringe elements: here.

WEALTH accumulated by the world’s richest 1 per cent will exceed that of the other 99 per cent by next year, Oxfam warned today.

A report by the anti-poverty charity in preparation for the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, later this week suggested the wealthiest 1 per cent had seen their slice of global assets rise from 44 per cent in 2009 to 48 per cent last year.

The figure is on track to exceed 50 per cent this year, with Oxfam saying that the richest 1 per cent held an average of £1.8m each.

Meanwhile 80 per cent of the world’s population own just 5.5 per cent of the wealth — about £2,500 each.

“It is time our leaders took on the powerful vested interests that stand in the way of a fairer and more prosperous world.
“Business as usual for the elite isn’t a cost-free option — failure to tackle inequality will set the fight against poverty back decades.

“The poor are hurt twice by rising inequality — they get a smaller share of the economic pie and because extreme inequality hurts growth, there is less pie to be shared around,” said Ms Byanyima.

More than 300 heads of state and government are due to attend the 45th World Economic Forum, which starts on Wednesday.

Oxfam said it would call for action to tackle rising inequality at the meeting, including a crackdown on tax dodging by corporations and progress towards a global deal on climate change.

THE Oxfam report on global wealth distribution should come as no surprise. By next year, just 1 per cent of the world’s population will own half of all the world’s wealth. Such huge inequality is the intended outcome of 30 years of capitalist neoliberalism and globalisation: here.

The international charity Oxfam has issued a new report on social inequality showing that the gap between the super-rich and the majority of society is not only not shrinking—it is growing at an ever-faster pace: here.

The US justice divide: why crime and punishment in Wall Street and Ferguson are so different

Matt Taibbi was the scourge of finance who called Goldman Sachs a ‘vampire squid’. Curious about the law’s leniency on fraudsters, he began to investigate how so many Americans do end up in jail – and what he learned blew him away

Matt Taibbi

Friday 17 October 2014 19.12 BST

Like nearly all white, American journalists, I’ve spent most of my career a million miles from places like Ferguson, Missouri. The mainstream media in the US hates the urban racism story and always has: too depressing; no patriotic angle; too hard to sell to advertisers.

By the way, real vampire squids are, at about 30 centimeter in size, much too small to be harmful, like vampires in legends, or Goldman Sachs in the real financial world. They are called ‘vampire’ for looking cloak-like and having red eyes, and they don’t feed on blood.

This video says about itself:

What the vampire squid really eats

26 September 2012

For years marine biologists have puzzled over what the mysterious vampire squid eats. Recent research by Henk-Jan Hoving and Bruce Robison at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute finally reveals the answer. These deep-sea creatures use long, retractile filaments to passively harvest particles and aggregates of detritus, or marine snow, sinking from the waters above. This feeding strategy, unknown in any other cephalopod (this group of animals includes squid and octopods), allows vampire squid to thrive in the oxygen minimum zone where there are few predators but marine detritus is abundant.

The punchline to all these stories in the US was and is always the same. No matter how great the crime or how much money was stolen, none of the Wall Street principals is ever indicted or, for that matter, punished at all.

When covering these tales, I often asked law enforcement officials to explain their thinking. Why no criminal cases? The answers I received were so grotesque as to be almost funny. “Well, they’re not crime crimes,” was an answer one prosecutor fed me, with a straight face.

There is no way to talk about how preposterous all of this is without first answering one basic question: who does go to jail in the US?

The simplified answer is that the poorer and less white you are, the easier it is to end up in jail. If you live in the wrong neighbourhood and you’re broke, on the dole, or, worse, undocumented, your chances of seeing the back of a squad car are better than fair every time you walk outside.

I know this is not exactly breaking news. In this country – and everywhere else – the rich have always had an easier time in the courts than the poor. But the sheer breadth of the current justice gap in the US blows the mind when viewed up close.

In years of researching both sides of our justice system for a book called The Divide, I saw things that now make me wonder why something like Ferguson didn’t happen sooner.

In the inner cities, for instance, policing has been degraded into a factory-style process, remarkably like commercial fishing. Old-time cops complained to me that the days of taking a crime and solving it with sweat, guile and a detective’s nose are over. The new crime-fighting strategies are a crooked numbers game, strictly a brute-force-and-weapons play.

Under the umbrella excuse of “looking for guns or outstanding warrants”, armies of cops now fan out into poor neighbourhoods and scoop up masses of residents on the thinnest of pretexts. In New York City, where I work, hundreds of thousands of non-white poor people are picked up every year for riding bicycles in the wrong direction, loitering, public urination, carrying open containers of booze; any dumb thing you can think of.

White New Yorkers such as me don’t have to worry about these “quality of life” (QOL) arrests. Studies have demonstrated that only minuscule percentages of white people are ever written up for nuisance charges.

On the other hand, I know one black resident of the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighbourhood of Brooklyn who has been repeatedly arrested for “obstructing pedestrian traffic.” In other words, standing in the street.

When I met him, Andrew Brown – a 35-year-old family man with three kids – had caught his most recent obstructing charge at about one o’clock in the morning, on his way home from a long night driving a shuttle bus for casino-goers. The only other person out of doors anywhere near his project apartment was a friend, with whom he was listening to tunes on an MP3 player. Nonetheless, cops wrote him up for “blocking” the empty sidewalk.

He pleaded with the officer that he was just a regular guy on his way home from work – “Dude, I’m wearing a tie!” – but the cops didn’t like his tough-guy build or his mini-dreadlocks. They dragged him to the station for booking and a strip search.

The idea behind mass QOL arrests is to throw high-crime neighbourhoods under an ongoing dragnet. In theory, the police snatch up the fugitives and the guns and toss back the innocent people.

In practice, innocent people such as Brown are harassed on a regular basis. It’s not hard for residents to see the calculus behind the high-level political decisions– approved by white voters – that led to these policies: entire neighbourhoods have been essentially “pre-indicted”, presumed to be up to no good.

Usually, these searches involve desperate single mothers, where the state is looking for traces of a secret live-in boyfriend who might be helping with the bills. One lawyer I interviewed described a client, a Vietnamese woman who been raped in a refugee camp in Vietnam. She applied for welfare and soon after had a state official in her home, rifling through her underwear drawer with a pencil end, demanding to know who the sexy knickers were for if she didn’t have a boyfriend.

The whole thing is a numbers game. The US’s poorest neighbourhoods are armed camps teeming with cops and high-powered weaponry, a huge amount of force and political capital arrayed against its weakest citizens.

The Madoff case proved that in order to actually be convicted and jailed for a Wall Street crime, you practically have to show up, weeping and spontaneously confessing, on the doorstep of the regulatory authorities.

There are a lot of reasons for the disparity, but two stand out: there are virtually no cops on the Wall Street/rich white people beat, and what few regulators there are increasingly don’t believe that paper or computer thefts in the millions or billions are “crime crimes” that warrant jail time.

But when Michael Brown is shot in Ferguson, Missouri, seemingly for no obvious reason, or unarmed Levar Jones is shot by a state trooper in Columbia, South Carolina for driving without a seat belt (“Why did you shoot me?” Jones is seen pleading, on video), or Trayvon Martin is shot and killed, we can see the psychological presumption in these places is very different.

If poor, non-white people are up to anything, those activities nearly always qualify as “crime crimes.” And even if those people are innocent, the swarms of surrounding police send a powerful message to them and the neighbourhoods in which they live. They say that while others go free for monstrous crimes, you are pre-judged at both a street level and a policy level. Sooner or later, that had to lead to riots. And, as Gary Younge has pointed out, sometimes maybe a riot is what it takes.

“Corruption, greed and economic inequality have reached a peak tipping point,” writes David Degraw. “Due to the consolidation of wealth, the majority of the population cannot generate enough income to keep up with the cost of living. In the present economy, under current government policy, 70% of the population is now sentenced to an impoverished existence.”

In this special 3rd anniversary of Occupy Wall St. edition of Acronym TV, David DeGraw sits down with Dennis Trainor, Jr.

David’s new book, The Economics of Revolution, is now available from DavidDeGraw.org.

DeGraw, who is advocating for a guaranteed income for all US residents, states: “If people could just wrap their head around the fact that we have over $94 Trillion in wealth in the United States, I think we would have a revolution overnight. It has gotten to the point where it would only take 0.5% of the 1%’s wealth to eliminate poverty nationwide.”

About the guest
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David DeGraw is an author and an organizer. An early organizer with Occupy Wall Street, David is credited by many as starting the We Are the 99% meme that launched a movement. He is an independent investigative journalist. In February 2010, DeGraw published a book called “The Economic Elite Vs. The People of the United States of America.” The last section of the book was a call to action, using the concept of 99 percent of American income earners.

On Monday, over 100 protesters were arrested as they marched through New York City’s Financial District and staged a sit-in in opposition to corporations polluting the environment. The arrests came after demonstrators did not follow police orders to disperse.

The protest, entitled Flood Wall Street, was attended by roughly 1,000, many of whom wore blue to symbolize rising sea levels and carried signs denouncing banks and large corporations for pollution.

Protesters marched throughout downtown chanting, “The people are rising, no more compromising,” and “We can’t take this climate heat; we’ve got to shut down Wall Street.” Protesters also tossed around a massive beach ball with the word “Carbon” written on it, until it was deflated by the police.

Cops, under the supervision of Police Commissioner Bill Bratton, set up barricades at the intersection of Broadway and Wall Street to stop demonstrators from reaching the New York Stock Exchange. When protesters attempted to dismantle these barricades, police held the barricades in place before using pepper spray against the protesters.

Activists then linked arms and staged a sit-in in the middle of Broadway, blocking traffic. At around 7 p.m., police warned protesters to disperse or face arrest. Police then handcuffed 102 protesters, who had remained as an act of civil disobedience, and put them into police buses.

Austin, Texas December 21, 2012: Acclaimed Arctic peace activist Kris Kringle, better known to the world as Santa Claus, was arrested early this afternoon at the Texas State Capitol. Claus was arrested while chalking Christmas wishes for the world, offered by children and other holiday merry makers.

“Today I saw the jolly red elf at the Capitol, cheerfully requesting that children write their wishes for a better world in chalk on the sidewalk. Santa said his favorite word was ‘Community.’ Various children wrote words like ‘Peace,’ ‘Friendship,’ and ‘Grace,'” said Occupy Austin‘s Lainie Duro, a witness to the arrest.

After wrestling Santa to the ground and placing handcuffs on him, activists also arrested Corey Elf after he used sidewalk chalk to write “Free Santa.” Both were arrested for Criminal Mischief, while Santa may face additional resisting arrest charges.

Occupy Austin stands in solidarity with Santa Claus and his elf. Three members of Occupy Austin, Audrey Steiner, Corey Williams, and Jim Bird were arrested earlier in 2012 for chalk. Though they were held in Travis County Jail, they have not been charged with any crime, raising questions about whether Troopers are arresting activists to silence them.

Occupy Austin believes that the use of washable sidewalk chalk is constitutionally protected free speech, and several previous court rulings agree. The organization demands that the Texas State Preservation Board respect the free speech rights of chalkers, and that State Troopers halt arrests immediately.

Occupy Austin called for a Free Santa Rally to begin at 6pm at the Travis County Jail (500 W. 10th St) and to continue until Santa Claus and Corey Elf are released. “DPS has overstepped all boundaries today and I will stand and wait for Santa. I hope he’s out quick, I hear he still has a lot to do to get ready for Tuesday,” said another witness, Christopher Michael, a member of the Occupy Your Capitol group.

About Santa Claus

Santa Claus, or Kris Kringle, is an internationally known child welfare and world peace activist. With the help of his many elves, Santa delivers gifts to good children all over the world while cultivating a sense of global togetherness and love. His busiest night, Christmas Eve, is just around the corner.

About Occupy Austin

Occupy Austin is a standing protest against the unjust and harmful power of large corporations over the world’s economic and political systems and against threats to civil liberties and democracy at home and abroad. Our Occupation began on October 6, 2011 and continues to hold marches and events throughout the city.